Monthly Archives: November 2015

Presentation Principle: Capitalize on the collective wisdom in the room.

There are many reasons to maintain humility as a presenter. Certainly, it will endear you to the audience. Positioning yourself as a co-learner with your audience members, and not the only “expert” in the room opens up the possibility of having your own presentation serve as a learning experience upon which you can build to advance your practice.

Recently, I taught a pre-conference professional development course – Audience Engagement Strategies for Potent Presentations – at Evaluation 2015, the annual conference of the American Evaluation Association.

Two interactive strategies during the course allowed participants to interact with each other, and also supplied me with important feedback.

Almost everyone (probably everyone, actually) who has written a survey has discovered something they wish they had done differently after the survey had already launched, or closed, with data already in hand. This is one of the many ways in which surveys are just like any written work: the moment you’ve submitted it, you inevitably spot a typo, a missing word, or some other mistake, no matter how many editing rounds you undertook. Often it’s a small but important error: forgetting a bit of the instructions or an important but not obvious answer option. Sometimes it’s something you know you should have anticipated (e.g. jargon you could have easily avoided using), and sometimes it’s not (e.g. an interpretation issue that wasn’t caught in piloting – you DID pilot the survey, didn’t you?).Continue reading →